Flexible cable is routinely used by electricians to route electrical wiring from one place to another. One popular kind of flexible cable is called basic armored cable or BX, and is made of metal which surrounds wires. This type of cable allows an electrician to snake wires in a multitude of paths without having to spend the time necessary to bend conduit. Hence, BX cable provides protection for wiring that is contained therein, similar to the protection afforded by conduit, without the negative of having to take a great deal of time to install the wiring. Obviously, it is often necessary to cut open BX cable in order to access the wires therein, for example, in order to terminate the wires. Consequently, tools have been developed over time that allow the armor of the cable to be split, which then allows a portion of the metallic shielding of the BX cable to be unwound, causing it to detach from the rest of the BX cable.
One of the challenges of cutting BX cable is that the blade must penetrate deep enough to cut the metallic shielding, but must not cut so deep that the insulation of the wires becomes nicked, as this could lead to a shorting of the wiring. This challenge has increased as the amount of space provided between the metallic shielding and the wires has been decreased substantially with newer types of BX cable. Furthermore, the different diameters of BX cable that are commonly used by electricians have increased over the years. The larger the diameter of the BX cable, the longer the cut made by a tool must be in order to allow the outer metallic shielding to unwind properly. Most cable cutters use a rotary cutting wheel that has some sort of depth adjustment device so that the user can increase the length of the cut of the tool so it can work on a wide range of BX cables with different diameters. Alternatively, a larger diameter cutting wheel could be used.
However, this necessarily means that as the user increases the length of the cut for BX cable with larger diameters, the depth of cut will also be increased. This has created a problem in that these types of tools will often nick the wires found within BX cables of larger diameters because there is not enough clearance between the shielding of the BX cable and the wires to allow for a deeper cut. Accordingly, there exists a need for a flexible cable cutter that facilitates the removal of the shielding of BX cables having larger diameters without necessarily increasing the depth of the cut, eliminating the possibility of nicking the insulation of the wires found within the flexible cable.